Affirmative art

David Bonetti, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Friday, July 31, 1998

BERKELEY - If the Berkeley Art Museum were showing work by two white males, it would not be particularly noteworthy; indeed, it would be normal. Until recent years, white males have dominated the schedules of even the most progressive and inclusive museums.

But the fact that BAM, a part of the University of California, is showing simultaneously two female African American artists - Carrie Mae Weems and Faith Ringgold - is worth notice, especially in light of the recent change in admission policies forced upon the university by the state's voters, at the behest of Governor Wilson and his point man, Ward Connerly.

At a time when the admission of African American freshmen has plummeted as a result of the end of UC's affirmative action programs, it is ironic that the university's museum is showing two African American artists purely on the basis of their merit as artists.

There is a practice that as certain states of being or experiences become extinct or vestigial, they become supported institutionally. The Nazis, for instance, planned for Prague a Jewish Museum that would document the life and customs of an extinct race. Many endangered species exist only in zoos.

Maybe, following those patterns, as the number of African Americans in the UC system declines to the tiny percentage with which Wilson & Co. would seem to feel comfortable, the school's museums and performing arts centers should devote their energies more fully to highlighting aspects of African American culture no longer evident on campus among its students.

It would be only fair.

Ringgold (born in 1930) and Weems (born in 1953) are artists of two different generations with correspondingly different ideas about artmaking. Both, however, address the African American experience from their position as women, and both root their primarily visual work in storytelling. In their work, texts and images are equally important, but how they put image and text together distinguishes them.

Weems, who attended UC-Berkeley and later lived in Oakland, has shown in the Bay Area frequently. A major touring Weems retrospective appeared at SFMOMA in 1993. Her socially concerned, photo-based work is marked by intelligent analysis and fierceness of expression.

"Ritual & Revolution," a sound and image installation, was originally made for the 1998 Dakar Biennial in Senegal. It appears here through Sept. 27 as part of BAM's MATRIX series, and it finds Weems in a lyrical and meditative mode.

Eleven diaphanous cloth banners, on each of which is printed a sepia-toned photograph, hang close together. You walk among them. The entry is framed by two images of a Greek colonnade. Between them, recessed, Weems herself appears garbed a la Isadora Duncan in a Greek tunic; behind her, on either side, hang mirror images of a Greek sculpture of a headless woman wearing a similar robe.

Next are images of nature - the sea on the left and a formal park with trees planted in rows to the right. Following are images of Ryoan-ji, the classic Zen rock and gravel garden in Kyoto; the decaying white-washed fortress in Dakar from which slaves were taken to the New World; Hopi Indian women and, finally, a crowd of blacks being hosed down in a demonstration, the image's dramatic chiaroscuro reminiscent of baroque painting.

Together, the images address ideas of nature and culture, how culture shapes nature, how, over a long period of time, distinctive cultures have emerged in different parts of the world and how political injustice exists along with beauty.

While you look, you hear a poem recited in both French and English. A lament for the failed revolutions of the past 200 years, it can be seen as an answer to Yeats' "The Second Coming."

"I was with you," the narrator repeats, "when you stormed the Bastille / & Winter Palace," "I was with you in the hideous mise en scene / of the middle passage," ". . . in Ireland too," ". . . in the death camps / shaved head and all," ". . . on the Longest March / in Cuba & in Timbuktu."

The voice is the spirit of Revolution, laid low by current circumstances, but waiting, like Marx's old mole, for her chance to rise again. Beware you who think that history has ended with capitalism's triumph: "& I could see again the coming of hope / in the May flowers of / May Day's / long / forgotten / O, Rise," Weems concludes - on an optimistic note.

As usual, Weems asks inconvenient questions and comes up with unwelcome answers. For that alone, no contemporary artist's work is more important.

"Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts," an exhibition with a lengthy touring schedule organized by New York City's New Museum, continues at BAM through Aug. 30. In it, Ringgold attempts to rewrite history, inserting African Americans, especially African American women, into situations where they might not have fit so comfortably at the time.

For Ringgold, '20s Paris was the Eden where racism was not quite so virulent and social situations possessed a degree of fluidity that allowed room for her kind. She uses the City of Light as the site for her idealized reconstruction of cultural history.

Ringgold uses the quilt as her medium, and by making it narrative through both image and text, she created a genre she calls the "story-quilt." An arts activist in the '60s and '70s, Ringgold made politically charged paintings and effigy-like dolls earlier in her career, but with her adoption of the story-quilt, she came into her own.

The 12 quilts of "The French Collection" - nine are on view at BAM - tell the story of Willia Marie Simone, who in 1920 at age 16 sailed to Paris to pursue a career as artist. As a model, she posed for both Picasso and Matisse, and she was a member of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic salon. Based on Ringgold's mother, who designed clothes for Harlem's privileged set, Willia Marie is a charming naif. But she comes with a healthy dollop of wish fulfillment. In reality, Ringgold's mother went to Paris only in her later years, accompanied by her daughter and granddaughters.

As charming as the story-quilts initially seem, their texts, which appear somewhat illegibly on strips of cloth incorporated into the quilt, offer a counter-narrative. Ringgold's words often possess an anger contrary to her imagery. In her works, there is a war going on that never quite gets resolved.&lt;